Other formats

    TEI XML file   ePub eBook file  

Connect

    mail icontwitter iconBlogspot iconrss icon

James K. Baxter Complete Prose Volume 1

Good Pope John

Good Pope John

For most people, whether Catholic or not, the life of Pope John XXIII was a magnet and a mystery. This elderly man, chosen by the Holy Spirit to rule the Church for four years, became an extraordinary portent, symbolising the Divine Fatherhood by an unshakeable benignity shown towards all members of the human race. I doubt if the attachment which many had to his person was excessive or sentimental.

For myself, I must record that joy springs up in my soul even now whenever I think of him, and that he exercised great power for good in my own life by intensifying my love for the Church and her pastors and by opening a way of understanding and positive tolerance towards my brothers outside the Visible Church.

For others I cannot speak – except to mention one incident. At the time of Pope John’s death agony, a girl wrote to me who was herself oppressed by many human difficulties. She enclosed a free verse poem in which she stated that she had just tidied her room ‘for John’, a task she might otherwise have neglected – and mentioned that his fatherly love had seemed to her (a non- Catholic) a source of warmth and brightness in the freezing desert of the world. Such personal influence is, to say the least, unusual.

page 714

Though he has not been canonised, it does seem to me that his holy life and sacrificial death make it reasonable for a Catholic to regard him as a saint. I pray to him daily for the protection of my family and for peace in the world, under the common title of Good Pope John.

Furthermore, I have found his encyclicals a source of illumination in social and political matters, and have tried consciously to think in the way he did. ‘Observe everything; overlook much; rectify little’ – this is a bold example to follow, and implies the necessity of abandonment to the Divine Will. Yet I have found it more fruitful than the counsel of more rigid exemplars. The testimony of the ardent disciple is perhaps inadmissible – yet I recall that other John who, in old age, addressed his flock as ‘little children’ and admonished them to love one another.

What then have the private notebooks of Pope John, now published in a book of four hundred and fifty pages, to say to us? Some readers may find them a little disappointing. They are not autobiographical – that is, they do not reveal much of the day to day detail of the life of the child of a peasant family, the seminarist, the war chaplain, the Bishop, the Papal Representative in Turkey and Greece (and later in France), the Cardinal Patriarch of Venice, and the Vicar of Christ. Nor are they pastoral statements on social matters – the reader who looks for the closely reasoned and balanced arguments of the Encyclicals will look in vain. These notebooks are primarily devotional – the unfading impulse that moves through them like a deep sea current is the quest of perfect obedience to the Divine Will.

In the seminary in Rome in 1902, he wrote some words which now seem prophetic:

. . . Even if I were to be Pope, even if my name were to be invoked and revered by all and inscribed on marble monuments, I should still have to stand before the divine judge, and what should I be worth then? Not much. I can hardly believe that my Jesus, who today treats me so tenderly and kindly, may one day appear before me, his face suffused with divine wrath, to judge me. And yet this is an article of faith and I believe it. And what a judgment what will be! The stray words during the time of silence, the rather mischievous expression, the affected gesture, the furtive glance, that strutting about like a professor, that carefully studied composure of manner, with the well-fitting cassock, the fashionable shoes, the daily morsel of bread – and then thoughts, the castles in the air, the wandering thoughts during my practices of piety, however short these may be – all will be told against me . . . .

A globe of purest crystal lit by the sun’s radiance, that is how I see the purity of the priest’s heart. My soul must be like a mirror to reflect the images of the angels, of Mary most holy, of Jesus Christ. If the mirror should cloud over, however slightly, then I deserve to be broken in pieces and flung onto the rubbish heap. What sort of a mirror am I? O world so ugly, filthy and loathsome! In my years of military service I have learnt all about it. The army is a running fountain of pollution, enough to submergepage 715 whole cities. Who can hope to escape from this flood of slime, unless God comes to his aid?

I thank you, my God, for having preserved me from so much corruption. This has really been one of your noblest gifts, for which I shall be grateful to you my whole life long . . . .

One obvious thing about these journals is that they are the record of the private meditations of an extremely good man – always good, from beginning to end, who never offended, in a long life, against purity, and little against charity or justice. The struggle, the torment, may seem to us unnecessary – what had he got to worry about? But he was bent on serving God perfectly; and the smallest transgressions were a thorn to pierce him. The experience of army life seems to have provided him with a full second-hand understanding of human degradation. Much later, when he was Pope, he must have been remembering the experience of a young, pure lad plunged into the abyss of barracks life, when he emphasised the hideousness of war as a source of moral evil.

In most of us – all of us, I was rashly tempted to say – a crevasse of moral failure separates the child from the adult. Our childhood experiences seem remote, like a mountain range – crag and gorge, voices from tree and cloud – observed from the dry flat plain. But in the life of Pope John, as revealed in these notebooks, there is little discontinuity, since he almost certainly never fell into mortal sin. The child survives as part of the adult – a deep fountain of innocent knowledge. He was a country lad. The life of his peasant relatives, their unhurried piety and fresh intuitions, seemed to him the normal life of man. He may well have been right in his judgement.

Of his sufferings as Papal Representative in Bulgaria – sufferings that sprang apparently from a faulty liaison with the Vatican, or actual mistrust in those circles – he wrote in 1930: ‘I must say very little to anyone about the things that hurt me. Great discretion and forbearance in my judgement of men and situations: willingness to pray particularly for those who may cause me suffering’.

There is a steady increase in serenity of soul throughout these pages, moving from the scrupulosity of the young priest bent on perfection, through various interior deserts, to the ultimate stability of the old man who wrote ‘I consider it a sign of great mercy shown me by the Lord Jesus that he continues to give me his peace, and even exterior signs of grace which I am told, explain the imperturbable serenity that enables me to enjoy, in every hour of my life, a simplicity and meekness of soul that keep me ready to leave all at a moment’s notice and depart for eternal life. . . .’

Characteristically he then remembers his ‘sins’, in the midst of which he feels the ‘caressing hand’ of God.

These notebooks, then, made chiefly during retreats, must be regarded as devotional writing. Yet I cannot review them formally, as one would reviewpage 716 some devotional manual – the august voice of the Church Herself breathes out of them. I find the Journal of a Soul a little terrifying at times – one drifts through it, picking up a maxim here and there, and then suddenly one realises that a man is being consumed by the Divine Love in front of one’s eyes. A gigantic lifelong effort of self-abandonment lay behind the fatherly kindness, the diplomat’s knowledge of men, and the shrewd peasant wit. He was absolutely in earnest. We have not the stature; not the innocence; not the endurance – what can we learn from this successor of Peter who is himself a Rock? Slowly – very slowly, I find – something of his quality invades the mind. One’s soul grows quieter; one’s useless anxiety is set at rest:

There are two gates to paradise: innocence and penance. Which of us, poor frail creatures, can expect to find the first of these wide open? But we may be sure of the other: Jesus passed through it, bearing his Cross in atonement for our sins, and he invites us to follow him. But following him means doing penance, letting oneself be scourged, and scourging oneself a little too. . . .

It’s obvious enough; but the person it comes from gives it ten times the weight. A man crucified; a man willingly lost in the deserts of God.

1965 (346)